“We as adults may actualize and help on the spiritual life in ourselves. But our best hope of giving Spirit its rightful, full expression within the time-world lies in the future. It is toward that, that those who really care must work. Anything which we can do toward persuading into better shape our own deformed characters, compelling our recalcitrant energy into fresh channels, is little in comparison with what might be achieved in the plastic growing psychic life of children did we appreciate our full opportunity and the importance of using it.” ~Evelyn Underhill

In many popular spiritual feel-good books of today, as well as in many of the posts on Facebook and Twitter, we are told something like: the past is gone, the future doesn’t exist, the only thing we can deal with is the present. While the basic idea that we need to act now, and do good today, rather than putting everything off until sometime in the future is a good one, there is also a negative side to this attitude which may actually be greater than the positive.

Look around you. Look at the world, the people, the climate, and so on. Listen to the news on TV or radio, or look at the web pages of a news service. Are you seeing a description of an ideal world? I certainly hope that what you see and hear is not what you consider ideal. Everyday there are murders, rapes, robberies and other crimes. People are dying of all sorts of nasty diseases and new ones pop up all the time. As I write this, the news is full of stories about a disease known as MERS, which is short for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, a respiratory illness with no known cure and a high mortality rate that has recently entered the United States for the first time.

If we have any sense at all, we realize this is a world that has problems and can improve. We may differ on exactly what to do and how, but nearly all agree that change is needed. And this is where the main problem with the “we only have the present” attitude is found. For starters, how are you defining “present”. Is it today? This hour? This minute? We have clocks so accurate that can break a second into billionths! So by the criteria that the present is one tick on the clock, the present would be less than a billionth of a second. That isn’t enough time to even become aware of anything, let alone doing anything. It should be obvious that if we are to change anything, it must be done in the future, whether that future be one minute, one hour, or one year from now. Yes, we have to start now, but if we do so with the attitude that the future should be ignored we can never plan the type of improvement that take time, sometimes years, decades, even centuries. So yes, we need to act now, but we also need to plan for a better future by remembering and trying to correct the mistakes of the past. And this certainly includes the spiritual aspirant who cannot achieve any significant enlightenment in the present, but must work to get it in the future.

< Read the complete blog post at Solar Wind. >

< Visit and bookmark Harold Boulette’s blog Solar Wind at:  http://spiritsun.net/ >

contributed by Harold Boulette

PERU’S SACRED PLACES OF POWER

Cultural Tour & Pilgrimage

August 2014

I T I N E R A R Y

POST-TOUR: “ANDES PILGRIMAGE”

Lima – Huaraz – Callejon De Huaylas – Chavin De Huantar

August 13 – August 17

< Click here to open a PDF of the itinerary for Week 3 of the 2014 Peru Tour! >

This is your forum to share higher-level experiences in Cosolargy through the images of your dreams and visions. All postings are anonymous. Send in verbal descriptions and, if you have them, drawings or paintings.

The primary value in these postings is simply to allow others to see that people do have relevant or meaningful dreams and visions. Another value is to see if others find that the dreams and visions we post are similar or identical to their own. This is why we ask for your comments.

Dreams are communications from the unconscious mind and sometimes the higher self. Some are simply compensation for attention directed elsewhere during the day; some are indications of bodily processes, and some help us work through conflicts. Occasionally, they communicate information from higher realms and thus have more than individual value.

As Cosolargists, we are learning to navigate higher realms. Dreams are part of these higher realms. The Worlds of Light, the realm of spirit, sometimes breaks through to the psyche and gives us information. What breaks through deserves our attention and analysis. In this section of the Community Communique, we offer Community members a forum for sharing their dreams and visions for the edification of the Community and themselves.

PHOTO: www.arkive.org

Dream No. 9 : Green Lizard Dream

Sometime in the winter of 2013-2014 I had the following dream.

I was in a normal looking room in a large office or hotel type building.  Looking up at the ventilator grate I saw that there was a brightly colored green lizard stuck halfway in it.  Its head and forepaws were outside the grate.  Immediately after this I found myself in a different room in the same building, down the hall and around a corner.  (This other room resembled a room in the Atlantis casino in Reno where the AEF had held a dinner some years before.)  Looking up at the ventilator grate in this room, I saw another lizard stuck in it.  This lizard was also the same bright green color, only its hind parts were showing.  In the direct way in which ideas come to one in a dream I realized, with a kind of certainty, that this was the same lizard I saw stuck in the other grate!  This violation of common sense caused me to wake up immediately.

The unusual nature of this dream and the vivid color of the lizard caused me to contemplate this for a while.  I thought of a couple of other famous unusual dreams: the one where a snake was eating its own tail, and gave chemist Friedrich Kekule his idea for the structure of benzene, or the one that gave Erwin Schrodinger the idea of his wave equation.  I immediately thought of the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement.  Maybe entanglement is not two particles that are entangled.  Maybe it is really the same particle that exists in a higher dimensional space, and which intersects physical space in two places.  If mass can deform physical space, perhaps it can be deformed in other ways which can allow one ultra-dimensional particle to appear to be two individual particles in physical space.

Not having the physics background or mathematical tools to investigate this possibility, I just kept this idea in the back of my head as a kind of curiosity.  My jaw almost dropped however when reading an article in Science News recently (“The Mysterious Boundary,” May 31, 2014).  This article outlines some of the ideas that theoreticians are exploring in an attempt to understand black holes, specifically their event horizons.  One of the ideas (proposed by Susskind and Maldacena) echoes the message of the green lizard dream almost exactly.  From the article: “[This proposal turns] entanglement into a shortcut through spacetime rather than a mysterious long-distance link. In essence, the particles inside and outside the event horizon become one and the same.”  Again, my jaw almost dropped!

July 2014

“We are obliged in the end to trust the universe and live by faith. Therefore the awakened soul must often suffer perplexity, share to the utmost the stress and anguish of the physical order, and, chained as it is to a consciousness accustomed to respond to that order, must still be content with flashes of understanding and willing to bear long periods of destitution when the light is veiled. …
“It is not from real men and woman of the Spirit that we hear soft things about the comfort of faith. For the true life of faith gives everything worth having and takes everything worth offering: … It entails a willed tension and choice, a noble power of refusal, which are not entirely being ‘in tune with the infinite.’ …The distinctive mark therefore is not happiness but vocation: work demanded and power given, but given only on condition that we spend it and ourselves on others without stint.” ~Evelyn Underhill

Many people have the idea that a spiritual life is a life free of stress and worries, free of difficulties, free of sadness, hunger, disease, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is true that, generally speaking, highly developed spiritual people will seem very joyful most of the time, but that is only because they have learned to accept the difficulties material life throws at them as a learning experience and as something they simply have to bear if they are to stay on this plain and aid others in their quest for spiritual growth. So don’t assume when you see the smiling face of a spiritual teacher or guru that she never has troubles, never gets ill, never grieves over the loss of a loved one.

So why try so hard to awaken and grow spiritually if it doesn’t get rid of the problems of the material world for you? For one, it makes you better able to understand those difficulties, to realize that they are not God punishing you, but just the karma you bring upon yourself, and sometimes just the randomness of the material plain, and that these difficulties come from Satan, not God. He also realizes that these problems are temporary and will not follow him into the spiritual realms when his physical body dies. And that brings us to the primary reason for studying and practicing spiritual growth techniques while we are living on the material level: to prepare us for functioning on the next level, the level of spirit.

The quoted text ends by telling us that spiritual growth gives us a kind of power, but power that must be used only to help others. This is very true. While I haven’t been seeing those ads for a few years now, there was a time when we were seeing ads on TV, in magazines and online, offering to tell us techniques that would allow us to take over the control of others and get them to do our bidding. Those tricks may work for awhile, but using this power in this satanic manner will give you a great karmic burden to pay, and eventually they will stop working for you. In other words; evil dies, good lives on.

< Read the complete blog post at Solar Wind. >

< Visit and bookmark Harold Boulette’s blog Solar Wind at:  http://spiritsun.net/ >

contributed by Harold Boulette

PERU’S SACRED PLACES OF POWER
2014 Cultural Tour & Pilgrimage
August 2014

The famous citadel of Machu Picchu, recognized as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World

I T I N E R A R Y
MAIN TOUR: “Inca Legacy”
Lima – Cuzco – Sacred Valley of the Incas – Machu Picchu
August 7 – August 13

< Click here to open a PDF of the itinerary for Week 2 of the 2014 Peru Tour! >

“The inward aim of the self is towards unification with a larger life; a mergence with Reality which it may describe under certain contradictory symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but which it feels to be the fulfillment of existence. It has learned—though this knowledge may not have passed beyond the stage of feeling—that the universe is one simple texture, in which all things have their explanation and their place. … The goal of the process, which has been called entrance into the freedom of the Will of God, is the state described by the writer of the ‘German Theology’ when he said, ‘I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.’ For such a declaration not only means a wiled and skillful working for God, a practical siding with Perfection, becoming its living tool, but also close union with, and sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual order: …” ~Evelyn Underhill

The first part of this quote basically tells us that when we let go and stop trying to be in control of everything, we will naturally flow toward the Light, move toward unification with God and the worlds of spirit. I’m not sure that is always true, but it is true that we must let go of our egotistical desires in order to open ourselves to the truth of God. As Zen teachers sometimes say, you can’t fill a cup that is already full.

She then goes on to tell us that as we become more enlightened, we reach a point where we become aware that the universe is one simple texture. That terminology sounds misleading to me. Obviously a porcupine has a different “texture” than a bowl of whipped cream. But that isn’t what Ms Underhill is talking about. She is talking about something that is behind the material being, something at the root of everything that is the same in all things. We call that something spirit. St. Francis recognized this when he referred to all other life forms as his brothers and sisters. In essence, we may be wearing very different masks, but the reality behind the mask is very much the same in all of us.

The third—and probably most important—part of the quote gets into the idea of serving God. This is always a difficult subject because most of us have been taught since a very young age that we should not allow others to control us, so when we tell people who seek spiritual enlightenment that they must give themselves over to the will of God, they are often not happy with that idea. For that reason, I love the term ‘the freedom of the Will of God’ that Ms Underhill uses. Because the truth that the advance spiritual students learn is that the people in the material world who consider themselves free are anything but. They are enslaved by a social order, enslaved by an economic system that requires them to work at jobs they often don’t want and doing things they often don’t want to do because they have to make a living and because they have been taught that it is there divine duty to consume, consume, consume, and then consume. So the paradox of serving God is that those people who truly serve Him are the freest people in the world because God is not about force, but about teaching you what is for your own benefit and letting you decide if you want to do it.

< Read the complete blog post at Solar Wind. >

< Visit and bookmark Harold Boulette’s blog Solar Wind at:  http://spiritsun.net/ >

contributed by Harold Boulette

PERU’S SACRED PLACES OF POWER
2014 Cultural Tour & Pilgrimage
August 2 – August 6

I T I N E R A R Y
PRE-TOUR: “MYSTERIES OF NAZCA”
Lima – Paracas – Ica – Nazca

< Click here to open a PDF of the itinerary for Week 1 of the 2014 Peru Tour! >

“The fear-based reality to which we’ve resigned ourselves to some degree was formed by our reptile brain’s survival instinct and the tendency of our left brain to control reality… Fight, flee, deny and control. A wide variety of methods for dealing with fear have developed over time from these basic tactics, then cultural worldviews grew from the tactics.
“Consider the ubiquity of war and its saber-rattling intimidation strategies, now used commonly in politics, business, and relationships. Consider the great credibility and power of scientific-mechanistic-academic thought, that co-opts or disparages intuition, art, dreams, oral wisdom, and personal growth. …
“In the Industrial Age we handled fear by strengthening materialism and patriarchy; in the Information Age we distract ourselves with a glut of media, data, and electronic devices … As we enter the Intuitive Age, these tactics and their resulting worldviews feel antiquated, …” ~Penney Peirce

Primitive animals like lizards may not have the mental facilities to reason out things, but they do have the primitive fear response built into their brains and it works very well in helping them stay alive.

Humans have that primitive part of the brain as well as more advanced parts that do allow us to think things through. Unfortunately, many of us are lazy and would rather just let the primitive brain control us with fear and instinctive responses to it. Now it may be a good thing if we are lost in the forest and suddenly find ourselves face-to-face with a bear that we have this automatic fear response but in most day-to-day activities that modern people engage in, reliance on a the most primitive part of our brain doesn’t make any sense. If you wanted to know how to better run a business you certainly wouldn’t consult a lizard or a toad, yet that is what you are doing when you let this most primitive part of the brain control most of your decisions.

One of the worse aspects of this allowing ourselves to run on fear is that it tends to block off our use of our more advanced spiritual facilities. People who fear they will lose their jobs if they don’t devote virtually all of there time to the job are afraid to devote a few hours a week to spiritual growth. Or they are afraid that if the boss finds out they are engaging in spiritual activities, he will think they are becoming weird people who are not totally absorbed by materialism ans start looking for an excuse to fire them.

Fortunately for us, the great spiritual and religious leaders like Jesus and Buddha managed to overcome this allowing themselves to be controlled by fear. These people often had a great deal to fear, but they didn’t hide from the things that might harm them, they faced them and often defeated them.

So one of the first things we need to do to become more spiritual is to realize when we do things based on fear, and start changing our ways and doing what our reasoning facilities and our intuition tells us is right.

Actually, I wouldn’t really say that fear-based human society is antequated because that implies that it made sense in the past and I don’t think it did. It is simply unworkable to live as if we are are all constantly running from the things we fear.

< Read the complete blog post at Solar Wind. >

< Visit and bookmark Harold Boulette’s blog Solar Wind at: http://blog.spiritsun.net/ >

contributed by Harold Boulette

PULLED IN The event horizon is framed by the bright ring in this black hole simulation. Color represents the intensity of light emitted by hot gas circling the horizon; red is brightest, blue dimmest. PHOTO: sciencenews.com

The entrance to a black hole could reveal insights into the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies.

 “A black hole’s event horizon is a one-way bridge to nowhere, a gateway to a netherworld cut off from the rest of the cosmos.

“Understanding what happens at that pivotal boundary could reveal the hidden influences that have molded the universe from the instant of the Big Bang.

“Today some of the best minds in physics are fixated on the event horizon, pondering what would happen to hypothetical astronauts and subatomic particles upon reaching the precipice of a black hole. At stake is the nearly 100-year quest to unify the well-tested theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics into a supertheory of quantum gravity.

“But the event horizon is more than just a thought experiment or a tool to merge physics theories. It is a very real feature of the universe, a pivotal piece of cosmic architecture that has shaped the evolution of stars and galaxies. As soon as next year, a telescope the size of Earth may allow us to spot the edge of the shadowy abyss for the first time.

“By studying the event horizon through both theory and observation, scientists could soon figure out how the universe began, how it evolved and even predict its ultimate fate.”

< Read the whole article by Andrew Grant posted on May 16, 2014 at sciencenews.org. >

“Plato regarded philosophy as the greatest good ever imparted by Divinity to man. In the twentieth century, however, it has become a ponderous and complicated structure of arbitrary and irreconcilable notions—yet each substantiated by almost incontestable knowledge. The lofty theorems of the old Academy which Iamblichus likened to the nectar and ambrosia of the gods have been so adulterated by opinion—which Heraclitus declared to be a falling sickness of the mind—that the heavenly mead would now be quite unrecognizable to this great Neo-Platonist. …
“In his treatise on Atheism, Sir Francis Bacon tersely summarizes the situation thus: ‘A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.‘” ~Manly P. Hall

Philosophy was once one of the great and noble fields of knowledge and its practitioners were highly respected individuals, kind of the celebrities of their day. But in modern times, real philosophy has been replaced by egotistical individuals simply stating their personal opinions about everything and calling that philosophy. Real philosophy is based on proper interpretation of divine knowledge and applying such knowledge to everyday situations. As a result of the degeneration of the field of philosophy to nothing more than the opinions found on the editorial page of the daily newspaper, there is little respect for this field anymore. While I haven’t made such studies myself, I suspect that if I were to go to a major university to get a degree in philosophy, instead of being taught how to gain access to divine wisdom (gnosis), I would be assigned to read the writing of various philosophers of the past.

It is therefore not much of a surprise that so much of the pretend philosopher of our modern times supports the idea of atheism. As Bacon said, when you just look at the surface of philosophy, or things in general for that matter, you are likely to come to false conclusions, but if you dig down deep, and keep your ego at bay, you will come to a very different conclusion.

I recently watched the animated movie “The Croods”, and one of the things I liked about it was the way it demonstrated that things are not always what they appear to be when we only view them superficially. First, we see the flock of cute little pink birds that look so cute and cuddly only to learn that they are essentially flying piranhas. Second, we find that the huge cat monster the cavemen have been hiding from for year is not chasing them to eat them, but because he wants to make friends and get his ears scratched.

Real philosophy is about getting to the truth behind the illusions, not about egotistical opinions.

< Read the complete blog post at Solar Wind. >

< Visit and bookmark Harold Boulette’s blog Solar Wind at: http://blog.spiritsun.net/ >

contributed by Harold Boulette